An open letter to Siemens and all those I-deas users wishing to switch away from I-deas

Dear Siemens & current I-deas users.

Two years ago, I was given the task to switch our entire CAD system from I-deas 5m1 with TDM to NX6 with Teamcenter Engineering.

There are quite a few adjectives that came to mind when considering this. Daunting. Overwhelming. Necessary.

After countless hours of working on this and planning it out, I have one of many my first (HUGE) assemblies completely converted & fully featured in NX6 – AND imported into Teamcenter. Our production work will now be done in NX6.

The I-deas community seems to be completely underground. These forums have a new post once a week! Go ahead, google “I-deas to NX” and tell me how useful it is.

One reason that my task of converting I-deas to NX6 was so challenging was the lack of quality resources available online. The internet is FULL of information. You can learn just about anything you want for free…Except this migration process.

Another reason why this project was so difficult – is that those at Siemens base their recommendations on what they think – not based on YOUR requirements. Once I became knowledgeable enough on what I really needed, their recommendations didn’t matter anymore, because I knew what I really needed.

I got the feeling that CERTAIN (*NOT ALL*) teams of people at Siemens would like to keep it that way. For some reason, it felt very difficult to extract useful information from a few individuals in certain departments at Siemens. Why? Draw your own conclusions. It is my opinion that if you have paid for I-deas & have licenses for NX, you should NOT have to pay anything to get things migrated.

Siemens needs to make money, and it is only fair to charge for their services. The problem lies in the way the migration process is presented. To me, the process was presented in a way that made it seem like there was NO way you could do this yourself, and you might as well pay a ton of money to have Siemens do it for you.

Let me say it again – My problem is the WAY the migration process is presented to the customer (me) by Siemens.

One final note. The last step of this process required us to quickly migrate I-deas data over to NX6 using the CMMsolo tool. Haven’t heard of it? I’m not surprised.

We asked Siemens to migrate this for us, after 3 days of waiting they came back with a quote of in the amount of $7000 and that it would take one week. In the mean time I was able to get everything working on my own (with the already paid for help of GTAC), CMM the data to NX6, and import it into TcE - before Siemens even started. Needless to say, we didn’t need to pay them to do it for us.

I have no idea how large the I-deas community is. For all I know, I-deas is completely dead. In an attempt to ease the burden on the rest of the i-deas community I’ll be launching a blogger website about this migration process. If I’m able to help just one team, with the knowledge that I’ve gained over the past two years – I’ll consider my website a success. Hopefully, in a few weeks the search “Ideas to NX” will no longer be worthless.

Cheers,

Frank Russo

Frank.M.Russo@ ( google email )

This Blog Exists

This Blog Exists, because Siemens is horrible when it comes to helping people switch from I-deas to NX.

This process is forced upon us, yet Siemens expects us to pay additionally for the assistance to switch.

This site exists when GTAC fails.

Welcome.